Claim: An audio clip of human rights activist Dr Mahrang Baloch confirms she is an Indian agent.
Fact: The audio is a deepfake.
A Facebook user posted an audio clip (archive) of human rights activist Dr Mahrang Baloch, allegedly featuring her speaking to foreign entities purportedly from India. The text on Baloch’s image reads, “Indian Agent Mahrang Baloch exposed.”
The caption, superimposed on a still image of Baloch, further states: “Mahrang Baloch’s audio has been leaked. Evidence of state betrayal.”
Here is the transcript of the audio clip:
“Yes, we know that Pakistani agencies shut down the network on the day of the rally. So we have given satellite walkie-talkies to some of our colleagues, so they may be in touch with the men sent by the chief from Iran and in the caravans we have received the things sent by you. The rest will be met on the 28th. I will convey the speech sent to me by Geneva to the people in my address. I have already told the [indecipherable, mispronounced word], whoever stops you, beat them, burn their cars, it doesn’t matter. Raise slogans of Pakistan dead in front of the security forces to incite them to laathi charge (baton charge) us, so this will give us international media coverage, and we will be successful in our goal now.”
The alleged audio can be seen as an attempt to portray Mahrang Baloch as a foreign agent derailing the country, and to misrepresent her advocacy efforts.
What happened in Balochistan?
Protesters held a sit-in outside the University of Balochistan in late March 2024, demanding the release of members of the rights group Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), whom they claim were unlawfully detained by security agencies. The rights group is led by activist Dr Mahrang Baloch, who was also at the forefront of the protests in Quetta. She was consequently arrested during the protests on 22 March and charged with “terrorism, sedition and murder.”
The police tear-gassed and opened fire on protesters, killing three and injuring at least a dozen. Dawn reported that “protesters pelted the police with stones and beat them up, leaving 10 personnel, including a policewoman, injured.”
The protests were held after families of missing persons said authorities barred them from entering the morgue in Civil Hospital in Quetta, and identifying the dead bodies that were brought to the hospital. A BYC spokesperson told Dawn that these families had gathered at the Civil Hospital hoping to identify if any of the dead bodies at the morgue belonged to their missing family members. There have been many documented cases of people either disappearing entirely as well as instances of missing people who are found dead bearing signs of torture. The spokesperson also told Dawn that police baton-charged the protesters after they tried to gain access to the morgue, and arrested several people.
Quoting official sources, Dawn reported that BYC members forcefully entered the hospital and took away five unidentified bodies with them, three of which were later retrieved.
However, authorities claimed the bodies belonged to insurgents from the banned militant group BLA, who were killed in a military operation following the group’s hijacking of a passenger train on 11 March.
Soch Fact Check could not independently verify whether the bodies at the morgue belonged to militants killed in the aftermath of the train hijacking or if they were of the victims of enforced disappearances.
Following the BYC protest about the Civil Hospital incident, the authorities arrested the BYC leadership. Mahrang Baloch and Sammi Deen Baloch demonstrated against the detention of the group’s members, which also led to their arrest.
The Balochistan High Court declined the petition filed by Baloch’s sister for her release on 15 April, whereas Sammi was released on 1 April.
On 23 March, Amnesty International issued a statement against the arrest of Dr Baloch that said: “Pakistani authorities must immediately release Mahrang Baloch and all others being detained for exercising their right to peaceful protest, and refrain from implicating Baloch activists in frivolous cases to unlawfully prolong their detention.”
Fact or Fiction?
An analysis reveals that Dr Mahrang Baloch’s audio in the claim is a deepfake.
The audio clip has all the tell-tale signs of a deepfake. Baloch speaks monotonously, without natural pauses throughout the clip. A listener can observe this as her statement sounds rushed and speeds up irregularly midway through the clip.
Another tell-tale sign is the pattern of her voice and accent, which appear different and unnatural compared to her original speeches at a press conference and protest rallies.
Further, at timestamp 0:13, when she says, “… in the caravans we have received the things sent by you…”, the audio elongates the word “you” momentarily before ending unnaturally.
This suggests a failure of AI-generation software to produce coherent human speech, signalling that the audio is a deepfake.
Soch Fact Check also analysed the audio through deepfake detection tools. Playing different sections of the audio over Hiya Deepfake Voice Detector, an AI voice detection tool, returned an authenticity score of 1 out of 100, confirming that the audio is a deepfake.
Additionally, DeepFake-O-Meter, a forensic tool developed by the University of Buffalo’s Media Forensic Lab has indicated that the audio is likely a deepfake. This tool employs six algorithms to determine whether the media is a deepfake. In this instance, the models AASIST, LFCC-LCNN, RawNet2, RawNet2-Vocoder, RawNet3, and Whisper yielded probabilities of 99.0%, 31.5%, 100%, 100%, 86.8%, and 0.7%, respectively, which suggest the audio is not authentic.
Consequently, Soch Fact Check rates the claim as false.
Virality
The Facebook post was liked 7,300 times and shared 10,000 times.
It also appeared on Facebook here, here, here, and here.
Background image in cover photo: Time
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